


Rituals for Shub-Niggurath

by PastaBucket



Category: Call of Cthulhu (Roleplaying Game), Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Cthulhu Mythos, Gen, Horror, Insanity, Lovecraftian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-11-04 06:15:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17893064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastaBucket/pseuds/PastaBucket
Summary: The insane ramblings of a madman, as he heeds the calling of the black goat of the woods, and other tales of cosmic horror.





	1. Chapter 1

I am about to rip my ring finger out of its socket. I know that I should stop, but my eagerness bucks like a wild animal, hungry and driven by the call.

...but I know of less demanding rituals that I can lure it with. Iä Shub-Niggurath! May the alchemy keep my mortal frame intact.

Human words are a mockery to the true testament of the old ones. Even the rituals described in the tomes, are only restricted means to an end. It is the unity of the mind, when you breathe with the goat, that truly matters. For that, the rituals are merely beginner's tools. I finally understand that now. I am ashamed of my blindness and my clinging to safety.

It is sanity that obstructs the clarity of the mind. Even the mighty body of Shub-Niggurath shudders with fear in the face of Azathoth, but I no longer shy away. Instead I embrace it. Iä!

Yes. These forbidden words will do for a first chapter. They are inhuman enough to share.


	2. Blood of The Goat

From pits beyond time and space, the blossoming roots of Shub-Niggurath flee. The closer to the source, the more pure its blood is. Say what you will about such sacrilege, an axe is put in the stem and the gushing is typically physically collected and sealed to protect its keepers. The potency of these flasks are often underestimated. Humanity has unflattering words for its effects: Cancer. Disease. Infestation. Mutation. All part of the inhumanly fertile body of Shub-Niggurath.


	3. Possessed Chanting

Night and day the chanting continues to bellow from my possessed lips - often phrases made from syllables of no earthly language. I can sense power in them, but I struggle to comprehend their alien meaning.

At first I could contain myself in public, but as more and more mumbled chants escape me, people become aware of the lunatic in their midst. My wife left me because my lips betrayed me as I slept next to her. When I asked her what I had said, her face just went pale with dread and she started screaming at me to get out.

...but the pathetic paper world of humanity no longer concerns me, for within my skin my flesh writhes anew, occationally contorting into a new, more comfortable, configuration.

I remember how I, as a young man, feared this possession, and took great care to ward myself against it. Indoctrinated as I was, I thought that civilization had conquered the wilderness, and that we were free men - not puppets just deluding ourselves to be.

Further down the root, the pulse of Shub-Niggurath is stronger and more undeniable. I reach out a hand and feel it beating, and soon we beat as one together - as child and father.


	4. Sanity

Sanity. Sanus. Sanitas. What a word they've invented to pride themselves on, discriminating knowledge between sanitary and unsanitary - "healthy" and "unhealthy". Their foolishness and ignorance are their own protection against the world.

The prophet tried to preach the truth to them, and quickly learned that they were not willing to listen, and faced with the dire fate of spending the rest of his life in an asylum, he fell silent.

...until he found a venue. Fiction. If he could publish his writings as fiction, then they would read it, and the truth would whisper to their minds. Story after story he wrote, weaving the existence and nature of the old ones into their very fabric, and encouraging his apostles to spread their own version of his word.

I hear you, great prophet! I hear the truth as you foretold it! I'll follow in your footsteps! Iä Lovecraft!


	5. Sacred Geometry

I hold in my hand a peculiar book whose leather front cover bears the innocent title "Sacred Geometry". Compared to the tomes in my collection, it's appears quite modern, although the author and the date being absent, makes an exact date of writing impossible to determine. Its pages are vellum - calfskin - not uncommon for the 18th century, but their contents are as old as time itself.

It's a few hundred pages - not particularly thick - but the scholarly knowledge that it imparts on its first-time reader, still makes it a weeks read.

The foreword is solely dedicated to devote worship of some blashpemous entity called Yog-Sothoth, asking it to keep the book safe.

The first chapter then goes on to rebuke the BC mathematician Euclid - the very father of geometry - questioning his assumptions, and promising to debunk his book Elements - an extraordinary claim to say the least. The book describes Euclid as an an idiot and a fool who should have known better, and indeed the author suspects that Euclid indeed DID know better, but chose not to divulge what he knew, in the interests of safeguarding humanity.

The second chapter then go into more mathematical depths, starting with the nature of angles, and how they appear to our eyes. The book exposes how the primitive biological nature of our eyes - gifting us with the ability to see depth - is actually preventing us from seeing angles as anything by static, in relation to our perspective. It then goes on to show - with pre-geometrical mathematics - how this actually isn't the case. This fundamental concept alone, that serves as the premise to the whole rest of the book, contractics everything that we've intuitively known about geometry since the dawn of time.

After having established the influence of perspective on angles, the next chapters brings in distances, and ultimately the relativity of positions. It is a hair-raising endeavor, to learn just how little the human eye is able to percieve.

As I read it, and the many sleepless nights that followed, I reached the conclusion that you could actually test this author's hypothesis. If my amateur math is correct, then spatial positions are dependent on all three dimensions being present. If you remove one of these factors, like for instance via a two dimensional aperture, then - according to the author's laws of perspective - this aperture will exist independently of its position, along the insides of its edges, meaning that one side of the aperture can exist independently from its other side!

I'm not an experienced carpenter by any means, but I was still intrigued enough to order a few pieces of ordinary treated wood. Fitting them together according to these new laws of perspective - alternating between the inside and the outside of the box, and other visualizations - was quite taxing. At first, I was astonished to find that I lost track of if I was working on one box, or two, since the inside of the enclosure differed in quantity from its outside! ...but that vertigo wasn't the worst part. As I struggled to make sense of it, I felt less and less like I was shifting my perspective, and more and more like the perspective was shifting before me, as if I had tunneled through something that had a presence of its own! The very thought of that rambling foreword now fills me with dread, as do apertures of any kind, if I stare at them for too long.

...but I did it. To the uninitiated, it all looks quite innocent: Two plain wooden boxes - both about 3 cubic decimeters, with a lid attached. ...but when you open the lid and peer inside, you also can open the "bottom" of it from the inside, and seemingly explicable reach straight through to the other box, independent of their distance from eachother. Iä Yog-Sothoth!

I still don't know how many boxes I've made, and thinking about that still makes my head spin. I've tried to put through various things, and the common laws of geometry aside, they come out the other end just fine.


	6. I Know A Guy

What would an exotic shop be without its drugs? If you come seeking answers to the secrets of the universe, they're a fast and easy method to at least quiet the mind - a sort of sleight of hand, that will also often ensure that you stay a customer, for better or for worse.  
Curious about all things for sale, I started asking around about a few darkened glass jars, containing some kind of a powder. What had drawn my attention to them, was that they were of the thoroughly sealed type, meaning that the contents was as dangerous as it was expensive.

The shopkeeper - as he often does when talking about the origin of his items - took on a serious expression.

He tells me that he knows a guy, who in turn knows a guy, but the story of acquisition doesn't end there. See, this second guy used to be somewhat of a hiker and nature explorer - a notable excentric, until he ultimately succumbed to old age, specifically delirium and pnemonia. The first guy - as his house doctor - used to take care of him, and was in turn entrusted a tale about one of his last hiking trips. He'd found a cave, out in the middle of the woods - its location a secret which he would take to the grave - and this cave he would naturally descend. Far, far into the dark underground he descended, into a place that had never known the sun, where his rope and his lantern was his only lifeline, driven on by what he, at that time, reckoned was foolish curiousity, but now he wasn't so sure about anymore.

...and at some point, the cavern must have intersected with a subterrainian river, for the rock was no longer dry, but wet and slimy to the touch. ...and around this point, the feeling that had overtaken him, where he felt at one with nature, and at one with the universe, bloomed into strange visions of far away worlds. One world in particular stood out, whose surface was but a hollow crust. Even as he emerged from the depths, his dreams, thoughout both night and day, was of the vast caverns underneath this remote planet, where life and love had somehow just amassed into a hivemind that he now felt like a part of. In his last fits of delirium, he told the doctor that his brightest lantern light, had lit up strange mushrooms the size of houses, and that they called themselves the descendants of the Mi-Go.

...and then, on his deathbed, he had a perculiar dying wish. A handkerchief.

There was a sort of understanding between them at that point, of what to do with it, and so the doctor took it home, and buried it in common earth soil in a pot, and waited. ...and what soon sprung up from the earth, he harvested, dried, and ground down to a fine powder, which he sealed in the jars that I now saw.

After telling him that I wasn't really interested in buying a jar, the shopkeeper told me that that was probably for the best. He told me that the odd buyers that purchased it, came back with their own tales of feeling united with both nature and the universe, yet their skin had aged, as if all life was being sucked out of it.

The keeper told me that he's no longer taking deliveries from the doctor. Apparently the last thing he heard, was that his supplier had been paying visits to his patient's grave, whose soil, he claimed, was a much more potent source. ...but this wasn't the real reason for the keeper's source of discomfort, and his long deliberations on how to dispose of the last remaining jars. It was that his oldest returning customer, kept referring to himself as "we", and when asked about it, he replied "We are descendants of the Mi-Go - explorers from the stars.".


	7. The Unmentionable Feet

I will not speak the forbidden words, on my life, but I will speak around them:  
I have seen the dreaded feet, bare and bloated.  
Through the mists of ignorance they wander, as we play and laugh. We are like children before them.  
I have seen the face on an old enemy, as she finally understands, and the feet are there.  
As time converge into that final moment, they're always there, having inevitably arrived.  
I have seen them stop, and I have seen the color drain from people's faces as they trace those legs upward.  
Her face is the last thing you'll see.  
...and so knowing this, you should be screaming with all your sanity. You should be fleeing in some vain, futile attempt to escape.  
The feet are coming. If you close your eyes, you can hear them, ever approaching, never even slowing down.  
There's still a little bit of time left.  
How many years away, only the owner of the feet can tell.  
Victory always goes to the black mother.


End file.
